Sopworth, North Wessex Downs, Lansdown
by KING FELIX
Summary: Names concealed, places real.


Sopworth, North Wessex Downs, Lansdown.

This is a work of fiction. This is a work of non-fiction.

You've come here looking for a quick, salacious story concerning a ghost. The main figure of this anecdote believed very much that ghosts are _not_ the handily-antropomorphic folklore curios we all picture -disincarnate, but still able to be understood, sympathised with, treated as human. I've never before written specifically about this incident, because why should I? It's no one's business except my own, and no one else would understand. I think about it constantly, however. Certainly it's hard to define, the -message?- behind what happened. Perhaps, like me, you used to have childhood ruminations along the lines of, 'To see a ghost would be amazing. You'd never think about anything else for the rest of your life'. But then, perhaps that's exactly why people _don't _see ghosts? Perhaps you have to make a conscious choice to swap earthly horror for supernatural horror, and from then on, never the twain shall meet?

But we know we can't swap one for the other. We know it's an imperative to worry only about our jobs, our family, living fulfilled earthly lives. Also, I believe most of us have a kind of valve in our minds to stop us obsessing too much about these funny, obscure creatures, so keeping madness at bay.

I say, 'see' a ghost. What I mean, of course, is 'sense' a ghost. That's the bit that gets to you, sensing the terrible ambience that might hold dead people captive. In a way, it's beyond even atheism versus theism; atheists have to admit that our consciousness, the visceral way we think, feel, daydream -is seemingly supernatural. And so we complacently travel from one faux-supernatural world to another. And the absence of God is exemplified in the way he doesn't even allow us to die outright.

I met E while working at a well-known upholstery factory in Devizes. For the most part, she was in charge of the machines which printed the silk tags for custom mattresses. Computers on the factory floor would relay the specifications to the overhead mezzanine cabin through sixteen-pin cables. Sometimes the production process would get out of synch, and I'd go to up there to help, and vice-versa.

She was old enough to be my mother, and narrowly old enough to be my grandmother, though she looked neither. We were both senior employees, but by no means management or supervisory level, and so we had a kind of bluecollar quietness in common.

Trustees can always have exhaustive conversations because they know to keep working as they talk, they know that cross-examining a friend keeps your mind ticking over a grueling nine hours. Random people conversing together usually only give a to-and-fro exchange of statements. It's a sign of true comradery, though, when you start to ask each other specific questions, scouring deceptively-simple points of view on otherwise homogenous subjects. It's like an archeologist brushing away caked sediment from an embedded ob'jet. Just by the end of the first shift I'd learned that she lived with her divorcee brother in a big house in Old Town, visited by squirrels and giant carrions. Since forever, orange juice was a treat, but if she had more than one glass, her cheeks would go red and her stomach would ache. She doted on cassette tapes and resisted buying CDs. A dozen other things.

In the first few hours of the second shift, I'd learned that E was colour-blind. That she'd been ten years a widow to heart disease. That, in her twenties, she'd been a paranormal investigator in the regional offshoot of a well-known national society. I remember asking her, trying all the while to be nonchalant, had her group uncovered any big bits of evidence for life after death? No. E had a funny little way of glancing down to the side, as if into a chasm, the chasm causing her to take such heavy breaths. Their group had travelled to a number of so-called haunted houses, none of which I knew except for that certain lock-bank cottage in Dauntsey, then derelict, now demolished. A few of the more precious members of the team claimed to have felt an unnatural coldness, or that they were being watched. E felt nothing. At home, attempting to capture EVP, her husband had set up a reel-to-reel inside the most insulated place available to the domestic spiritualist -the inside of a gilded oven. He asked, is anyone there? Are there any spirits? Is there any message you would like to convey? He'd listened back to the recordings through 635-jack headphones with painstaking closeness. E had taken the duty of double-checking the tapes.

At first, she felt anticipation that a ghost would take great satisfaction in responding, because it would sense she was afraid and would want to exploit that fear. Later, she felt anticipation that perhaps their desperation might somehow _will_ a ghost to reply. Later still, she felt anticipation that the ghost would surely reply soon, simply because it would sense they were about to give up and would bring forth some kind of eleventh-hour showmanship. But actually they never heard a thing. Not a breath or a single variation in pitch. I remember asking, did she ever worry about hearing something that was purely an auditory hallucination?

At our factory, she worked steadily, rolling-up a coil of ribbon, resetting a spindle, whatever. She told me that she never _did_ hear any auditory hallucinations. But did she actually _worry_ about hearing auditory hallucinations? She told me it was a danger she'd thought about _constantly _as she listened back to that deadly white noise.

I often brood on those long factory shifts and the conversations we had. How long, exactly, did we have together, behind those narrow desks, in that murky attic warehouse? I feel sure it was more than five years but less than ten. But why don't I remember specific summers and specific winters? Did I ever discuss with E either of the torture-hearted girlfriends I had during that period? I can't remember. That part of my life feels somehow sublime. Dizzyingly truthful. Sacred. Though I can't say why.

Sometimes we were joined by a young twenty-ish lad, we'll call him Jerry. He was bright and friendly, if a little bit less of a hardcore-bluecollar than E and myself. He was very interested in the paranormal, with subscriptions to both 'The Unexplained' magazine and Fortean Times. But E never once engaged in a ghost-themed conversation with him. Then again, at the time, I remember feeling vaguely despondent that, for all the hours and hours of ghost-talk we'd had, she'd never actually asked me flat-out if _I'd_ seen one. I _hadn't_, but I was hurt she never wanted to double-check. Possibly she assumed that if I had, I'd have volunteered it within our first few days of our knowing each other. Then again, there was always a feeling with E that the thought of ghosts was something inexplicably personal. You could discuss and dissect it, certainly, but it would be with that uncanny intellectual candidness, like Virginia Woolf talking about schizophrenia, or CS Lewis bringing home bereavement. Now why?

One of the classic pieces of paranormal reportage that interested E the most was the story of the Enfield Poltergeist, investigated by Guy Lyon Playfair. These days I've often needed to take business trips to Enfield and I still look hauntedly out of the cab window as if any of the thousands of terraced houses might be the place. There were a couple of things about the Hodgson family's experiences that E was drawn to. Firstly, that the poltergeist levitations and materializations were observed by quite a few public officials, including a serving police officer, a former police officer, even a lollypop lady. Then there was the character of the poltergeist itself, a classic 'confused spirit', unable to mentally process the fact it was dead.

Some people subscribe to the idea that that ghosts are like recordings stored in the ether of time and space, able to think and react, but only in as much as their disintegrating minds are like railway tracks, or someone 'mistaking the map for the landscape'. When the Enfield poltergeist possessed one of the young girls of the house, it transpired it was the spirit of an old, blind man who'd lived and died there some years previously. But when asked, specifically, about where it came from, the spirit gave the name of the local cemetery.

You hear this and your mind gets trapped in a terrible feedback loop. Firstly, that it's so bleak and wretched a condition that it must be true. But even if the young girl was making it up, what would her motive be to conjure such an arch-nihilistic story? You can narrowly imagine someone becoming obsessed with, say, a local murderer, or a Satanist, whathaveyou. But something that's simply dead, and disintegrating? Where's the dark romance in that? Where's the meaning? I refer you to the time when Jung thought he'd confuse Freud by having him psychoanalyse a dream about a ghost. He'd been so sure that ghosts were a kind of psychological Nth point. Of course, Freud had managed to offer a conventional reading, but that's not the point. Jung believed.

At best, there's a morbid capacity to worship living death. No one knows why.

I mentioned I'd had some particularly torture-hearted girlfriends during this period. I'd split up with the latest one and was feeling intense and fragile. Jack Jones walking along the green-paint-industrial siding one Saturday afternoon, and I unexpectedly bumped into E. She told how this was her third or fourth pass along the gritty little path -an hour ago, she'd found one of her neighbours, an eighty-year-old lady, distraught because she'd managed to lose her wedding ring while walking home from the shops. The neighbour believed there was a good chance it had been snagged-off as she'd swapped the plastic bags from one finger to another. And so E had offered to walk along the same path and examine the ground closely. E wasn't particularly community-minded. Neither am I. As we pored, I felt breezy and darkly self-obsessed. Finding the ring resting lightly on bank of packed mud, edged in beneath the wiry grass; I could perfectly picture it in my mind. There was a good chance, too, that it might actually happen, because -why not?

I can't be one hundred percent sure the following conversation actually took place as we were looking for that ring, but it feels like it did in my memory. It was around that time, certainly.

I asked E; during the years of unsuccessful paranormal investigation, wasn't there ever a desire to simply consult a Ouija board? Obviously there's an urban-legendary dread associated with the Ouija, but then, the world of the spirits either exists or it doesn't. It was kind of disingenuous, I suggested, to believe that regular ghosts were being obstinately silent, whereas demons would be both forthcoming and dangerous. It made no odds if you experimented, scientifically, forensically -making recordings and getting answers one way or another.

Casting her head sternly, E told me she agreed, in theory. But had her late husband suggested using a Ouija, she'd _still _have vetoed it. Intellectually, it made sense to experiment with whatever resources were available. In her heart, however -she told me she was deathly afraid of demons. Not so much the concept of some all-powerful, human-hating monster -but the mystery of them. Her voice was steady as she told me. She called them something like, 'an abrupt mystery'; like suddenly coming face-to-face with God, His showing you you've only ever lived in a world of shadows, and the alternative mode? Choking, convulsing madness.

Towards the end of the river path, before the gravel and mud makes a wide twirl into Old Town, the river bank carries on to a series of tiny farms. Even though the mud and brown foliage is steep and slanted, it would still make an interesting footpath. Except seemingly, no one has ever been down there. E and I loitered for ages, looking for the thin wedding band.

It's a typically English thing, those banks of brown thorns and reedy vines; straight from their inception in some medieval summer, they immediately constrict into undead husks, perennial. On the highrises, granted, there was a pretty willow or ash tree, if only they weren't so languid like traumatised disaster victims. Think of the certain archetypes of ghost story. You could argue that the successes of Lovecraft and M R James are simply extensions of that Victorian standard of someone being in a room, alone, then being visited by 'something', the mere sight of which drives them insane. But what are the psychological mechanics of this? If you think about it for more than a minute or two, it seems a ridiculously tall order. The 'something' would have to be both transcendentally bold, horrific, _surprising_ -and it would have to contrast _exactly_ your second-to-second consciousness.

These days, pick up any issue of Hi-Fructose or Juxtapoz and you'll see the sort of thing Lovecraft, M R James and the Victorians were talking about, only now they're realized by urban-village advertising execs, graffiti artists, post-Hipgnosis record sleeve designers. Hell-quizzical animal skulls walking around on high-tensile bird legs, eyes that pierce your soul, then straight through to the other side. These sophisticated, mind-halting shocks have been with us for a long time now. You can appreciate, for instance, how Donald Sutherland's character really _would_ have been driven insane when, in the place of his dead, infant daughter, he's inexplicably face-to-face with a gurning dwarf. It's psychologically sophisticated, but it's not apophatic.

Once again, we started out with gothic, paranormal grandeur and we've been forced into an alliance with atheist pouting. Part of us is hurt -since pre-history, our minds have had all sorts of neat, cultural shorthands; why shouldn't there be something in the shadows which neatly illustrates inhuman oblivion, utter and inescapable?

It's possible that the thing-in-the-locked-room which drove so many a Victorian everyman insane didn't do so by merely _looking_ insane -perhaps it transmitted, psychically, some intravenous _wholesale_ madness? But wouldn't it be worse that way? The creature would still have to be waiting patiently for the exact juncture; still the unutterable fear would be for the entertainment of something strange, not human.

E took on a dour, flittish spark. The unspoken buzz was that the ring would never be found. In turn, I got to thinking about the death of her husband. Rheumatic heart disease. Had it been protracted? Had it somehow been disturbing beyond mere bereavement?

My life, at that time, was a repetition of clunky chores, nothing more, nothing less. However, I had a good friend in D, who I'd known for years from the late eighties graffiti scene. Surveying one of the old rail bridges on the outskirts -in those days, the standard was so high, they were like canvasses- he was extremely enthused about a new film that was set to arrive in a few months time. 'Have you heard of The Blair Witch Project?' I immediately liked the name because it sounded like a documentary. Political animal that I am, I heard 'Blair' and imagined an expose of New Labour. Those were the days when I believed there was hope for society, and by merely talking about the bourgeois, we could slowly start to dispel them. But the pull of The Blair Witch Project was that it was reputedly real video footage from a band of ghost-persecuted hikers. D had read somewhere that the film was extremely watchable. That no ghosts were ever seen, the hikers slowly going insane nonetheless, leant it endless credulity in my book. If it was a hoax, the perpetrators would have to have a pretty convincing grasp of nuance. I looked forward to the release.

It was coming to the end of my five-years of strangulated love affairs. I wrote like hell. Terrible Greene-lite novellas, brutal, heart-felt. At best, pretentious and ill-scanning -but readable like Morrissey's autobiography. A consequence of all the writing was that the balance of my mind was getting muggy -I no longer dreamed; I think whatever it is that needs to get expressed or expended by the subconscious during REM was instead being used in my writing. I went for months and months with nothing, without even the lingering hint of a dream-fragment. In the past, I'd had excellent dream-recall. Even if it was stubborn, upon waking, 'what's the first thing on your mind?' -and usually I could back-engineer it to remember even the most elusive dream. But now there was nothing. I felt sure I'd never dream again.

Or this is what I was meant to think.

One night, from out of nowhere, I had the most vivid dream of my life. It wasn't a lucid dream, but somehow even more striking. If that makes any sense at all.

It was autumn-mute and I was drifting on a leafy suburb-to-suburb main road, built to accommodate Renault commuters, though today with no traffic at all. Long, low swells in the surrounding countryside hinted at a place well-served by rail-lines, some used, some disused, all centuries antiquated. Understand that it was nondescript in terms of having no identifiable landmarks, though the houses themselves were stark and Victorian, semi-detached shards set at angles within colourless allotments. There were distant woodland backdrops wild as you like. Call the place 'cosy', or maybe just cosy because of my presence there; I felt like some visiting emissary from a land that was -harmlessness exemplified. I suppose, innocuous, as if, simply -the sensation of everyone _thinking_ could unite all living souls.

With this ethos full in my heart, I decided to try and enter one of the houses. I lingered by the thin iron gate, staring at the cramped alcove of the front door. Convention, mundane social norms, friendly little visits -while I wanted to interact with the occupants, I was a thing of dream, full of dream-like intimacy. I moved to the side of the building, to a basic-looking outhouse. Easing onto the overhang, I moved up a sheer wall to an upstairs window.

Through a warmly-decorated bedroom, I met a beautiful girl in the hallway. She smiled on seeing me. She was overjoyed as if good times were once again to be recommenced. Her streaked eye-sockets, jaw-with-no-dimple, smile-kinked cheek muscles -all of it came to life in carefree joy. We were close friends, probably lovers, and I'd been away for some time. Across the landing she moved daintily, giddily, continuously turning her head to check that I was following. She really was beautiful and crazily happy. On the other hand, I was terribly daunted and swallowed up in the novelty of it all. She was absolutely real. As real as anyone.

We swept through into the diminutive main bedroom. That was when I became truly phased. How, after all, was all this possible? You don't just drift up the side of an anonymous house to be greeted by a young, beautiful girl, diamond eyes full of joyful eternal soul. I'd never seen her before, but me? She reacted as if I was the first blast of heatwave sunshine on an idyllic summer holiday. There was me stranded in a magically real suburban snowglobe.

She leaned back on the duvet, smiling meditatively and resting her eyes on me. Just an approximate gaze which passed over the mass of my body and the space where I stood. There was a queasy feeling I couldn't hold on to any longer.

"Do you know what I am?", I asked her.

Now her face changed. She quivered, staring just as deeply, but now in horror. A scream was on the cusp. As I turned to catch sight of myself in a tilted tabletop mirror -for a split second only.

Certainly, what I was -what I'd suddenly become in the eyes of the girl- was no man. Call it a humanoid mass made of drywood branches, less than twelve, more than six -in the pose of a hare on its hind legs. Height: 6ft. Torso leaning and rising in buzzing flows of invisible voltage. Embedded at the top of that torso I saw a muddied stone daubed-up into an ashen face, someone very old _physically_, very young by dint of Satanic force (what else to call it?). Eyes that seared and scoured endlessly.

In a way, I longed to actually hear her scream, because nightmarish though it was, it would at least have given the event a psychic full-stop. Relatable horror. Instead I just blinked open my eyes to the sensation of the air itself laughing. Numb -dizzy with the horror for hours, days, weeks.

What was going on in that other world? What sort of madness was that strange creature spreading, the eternal soul I previously thought was mine? That thing of loneliness, isolation, unknowable truths. The madness started to eat away at me.

Yet I'm a good actor, or at least, masterfully private to the point of taciturn. In the daytime, the industrial harmonies of the factory welcomed me and I simply got on with my work. It was another world, as usual -lolling your eyes to the huge bay-tracks mounted on the ceiling, there among the buzzing activity.

I asked E; she'd spent so much of her life in pursuit of them, did she ever _dream _of ghosts?

She told me no, that it was a case of the thing-that's-foremost-in-your-mind being mutually exclusive from your dreams -that very reason. She then asked me flat out and case in point, did _I _ever dream of the thing _I _was obsessively scared of? I'm afraid I probably lied and said I never remembered _any _of my dreams. '_Obsessively' _scared, though -that was a handy term. You can sometimes cure your obsessions merely by indulging them.

By now, with the studio PR uncovered, The Blair Witch Project had been outed as a wholly fictional motion picture, though this didn't dim anyone's desire to see it. Outside the Swindon Odeon, the iconic eyes-full-of-realistic-tears poster gave D and I pause for thought. And as for S, his new girlfriend, she was merely excited. She was nice; D always went out with interesting girls, but S was both interesting _and_ thoughtful. Fidgety prayer-hands between thighs during the opening scenes of the student film makers interviewing stern woodland fishermen. The sketchy, video-buzzed forestry never seemed to fill the whole screen until later, maybe not even then. It was the strangest thing; while I was rapt, I still noted the curt movements and the terse breathing of the audience.

It twisted, it hardly blinked; some kind of triumph that no one needed to make even the _subconscious_ choice to suspend disbelief. Somewhere up there in the magnetic-tape-blurred branches.

At work, I resolved not to talk to E about the film, because I was worried she might think of it as frivolous. She surprised me quite a bit by bringing it up first. Had I seen it? Did I know what all the fuss was about? I think I said it was interesting, nothing more. I mentioned that the three hikers were unusually likeable characters, and that helped engross the viewer all the more. I asked, in turn, did _she _plan to go and see it? E explained that her whole life she'd had a problem with fiction, be it novels, or film, or theatre plays. She just found it overwhelming. It was something, she explained carefully, to do with the way actors faced each other, or the way an author envisioned their characters in a room together. There's something subtly dangerous -explosive- in one living mind connecting with another, and it's something far below the level of being either introvert or extrovert. As infants, we learn to talk to others, but only because we must. For an author or an actor to think they can bait out that explosive X-factor was, to E, crazy -a form of over-optimistic hysteria.

At the time, I barely understood this. I understood it even less when, a little later on, I learned from her brother that E had once been a member of an amateur dramatics troupe.

Having The Blair Witch Project clogged up in my mind, I felt hissingly meta. By degrees, I thought I'd discovered the nature of our shared, perennial obsession. Naturally, we were scared and fascinated because we believed ghosts had the potential to be _everywhere_. I remember asking E, had her team of paranormal investigators always looked around places that had _existing_ reports of ghosts, or merely very gothic places that _felt_ haunted?

'This is exactly why we didn't see anything', E told me. At their most adventurous, her team had visited the scene of historical deaths where the victim might have cause to feel angsty about their abrupt exit. But it didn't help. E's belief was that ghostly encounters always needed to have a bizarre and unexpected component.

I also talked about it with D. He thought it was the main reason The Blair Witch Project was such a success -there's no place more frightening than middle-of-nowhere woodland full of bunched-up trunks as far as the eye can see. I wasn't quite convinced. S asked me if I honestly wouldn't be as frightened as the Blair Witch students if I was in a similar circumstance. Shrugging massively, I told her I'd like to think I'd recognise it as psychological warfare. Duck down in the darkness and wait. Granted, if you got scared by the sound of the crying baby, how hard was it to substitute in your mind thoughts of -for example, a scene from Life of Brian, or a Chris Morris hoax call? They don't exist in the same psychic plain as ghosts; one expels the other.

S told me out-and-out she'd be scared. D suggested he didn't know whether he'd be scared or not, in such a knowingly-cool voice that we all laughed. It was those funny few days in 1999 that were marked as a bona-fide blistering heatwave. We decided, the three of us, to go camping in the woods of Sopworth. D had the perfect spot, and S wanted to go there anyway because it was very close to one of the orienteering caches she looked for as a hobby.

The Raggedy Cot, sometimes known as the Raggedy Castle -perhaps you've heard of it? On the snaking lane between Sherston and Hawksbury, call it 'Sopworth', call it 'Knockdown', a place of dark woodland, you suddenly come across a tangled bank of leaves just slightly more imperious than the others. A twenty foot medieval reservoir tower, abandoned for a century plus, maybe two. And herein lies the intrigue; the thing is densely overgrown but with the thick trees actually pressing and mauling the thick masonry. Why abandon such a sturdy building? And why do the thick trees grow to so precise a nexus? Ironically, a few yards back towards the woodland side, there's an antiquated water pump, stark like a sun dial, completely unmolested by undergrowth. I suppose the whole place is a diminutive version of the huge, black reservoir towers that are just two or three miles away in Chipping Sodbury. This one, a special little well to serve the medieval woodsmen that must once have trudged over the Bullpark Estate like an army.

Footnote. If you feel the need to search engine 'Raggedy Cot', you'll exclusively get results on the Raggedy Cot pub on Michinhampton Common, which is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a highwayman. I don't know the reason behind why there's two 'Raggedy Cots' so near to each other. Maybe there is no reason. I believe Sky TV did an hour-long documentary on the pub a few years ago; I didn't watch it because I've known the story since forever, inside and out, along with all the other local legends -the Charlton UFO, the moving graves of Hullavington, etc. Passé. Over-hyped.

It's important to say, however, that the Raggedy Cot in the woods isn't as scary as it _might_ be -the interior is jammed solid with timbers, meaning no dusty lurking ground for ghosts, witches, tricks-of-the-brain. The only striking thing about the inside is that there's seemingly more bits of timber than can be accounted for by simply the ceiling and roof having collapsed -and some of the twenty-inch timbers; how might they have been splintered in half except by a lightning strike?

Still, the Raggedy Cot was only our starting place. D told a very convincing story about a _second_ rustic reservoir tower, inexplicably deep within the woods, this one intact. He claimed to have seen it while hunting with his dad and older brother when he was ten or eleven.

And so the plan for our expedition was laid out in stone. It's hard to say whether our intention was something sophisticated or childish -the idea that you could connect with ghosts simply by going somewhere that _felt _frightening. Not that I was gaudy or disrespectful; all's fair in ghost-baiting.

We met for a drink on the Wednesday night before the weekend we were due to go; S expressed surprise that D and I had planned the trip so soon -she thought it was the weekend after next. But we had the monster tent ready, the sleeping bags, torches -so why not?

Though S had only known me a little while, we were friendly enough that she could cross-examine me about being single once more. How long would I wait until I started looking again? My immediate response would have been, 'Never again'. But that's what I always said. I like to think I'm wise enough to know that, in my relationships, animosity and rowing are inevitable. Then again, there's a still deeper wisdom in knowing that the whole thing is irresistible. Love or pseudo-love, even without the sexual aspects, becomes a masochistic melodrama that's so deeply satisfying. Addictive. Like shooting anonymous bystanders in a computer game. Or winning a dispute with a local government bureaucrat who's blatantly too zealous for the job. The stakes -your personality, a blunt object, and it doesn't matter if it breaks.

I just told her, I'll start looking when the mood takes me. Perhaps she wanted to bring one of her friends along to matchmake us? It would never have worked, though; I'd have been too distracted by peering through the tree trunks to plumb the mind of some beautiful girl -or stare at her legs.

It was a hot morning, with a heatwave buzz that felt like it was part of a continuous wall that'd been in place for days. The countryside air, insidious wafts of a liquorice smell derived from huge gardens, diesel, car rubber. We were dropped a quarter mile short of the woods by good old Andybus. It was further along through the canopied lane, and wasn't it a hell of a precursor to actually venturing inwards through the trees. Your eyes were drawn to the most distant and deceptively solid line of trunks. Also, the oversized chips and vines lolling between them, just like dumper truck bins having been lazily spilt. Trope Number One: we all agreed it was the reason woods like this were so eerie, because there was no other kind of landscape where things could hide so easily. God's original gift to witches, back from when Earth was first being formed.

We all of us imagine, if there was an abstract map of our souls, or a symbol, or a diagram, it couldn't fail to look bold and beautiful. But as bold and beautiful as the stark silhouettes of lonely tree trunks? Bark, lichen, moss, cracked and colourful in a vision of economy we can barely conceive of. And then the branches, angling upwards as steep as you like, though never quite heaven-ward. It's a territory we can't deny.

D and I planned to play a trick on S by walking right past the Raggedy Cot and seeing if she noticed. It didn't work out that way, because as we approached, D's limbs went loose and he subconsciously became awe-struck. In summer it's a little more identifiable. In winter, there was about as much chance of seeing it as a bird's skin beneath his feathers. The firm, ancient masonry was something to behold, curiously smooth and solid. Telling. As a bane of capitalism, I hate this religious veneration British people have for buildings. And yet, here was the most solid and fortified structure I'd ever seen, completely exotic -abandoned.

Have I made you want to buy it, Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer? I forbid you. Why don't you renovate an antique mince-meat machine then feed yourselves in.

At this point, there was no fear whatsoever, because we were still directly beside the lane. Peeking through the back window, there was the dense crisscross of fallen timbers. S wondered if there were bats within. D wondered, or leprechauns? They had a conversation about why anyone should believe in ghosts but not leprechauns, fairies, The Gentry. I had a clear opinion about this, but I kept it to myself. We inherently know the mechanics of ghosts. We have an a-priori affinity. Leprechauns and fairies just sell advertising.

There was no fear even when we were around the back, in the silence, beside the dark woods proper. Staring at the iron water pump, the handle still working, D wondered why no one had torn it out of the ground and sold it as an antique, or at least as scrap. It was a good question. He asked me if we should do it, and I went into a tail-spin. In our younger days, we'd never passed up a chance for scallying, stealing copies of Empire and Playboy from outside the newsagent at 5 AM, using D's BT Operator's Key to take handfuls of coins from distant phoneboxes. I wondered if it would be weird if I dismissed it out of hand now. Still the idea of bringing down a curse fluttered stupidly through my mind. 'Maybe on the way back, if (S) will carry it'.

The little orienteering game which S had been looking forward to was finished soon enough. She played with her map and compass and found the log book in an anonymous cusp of dry earth. I felt vaguely sore that, if there were any ghosts or witches present, they'd not been so mischievous as to mess with it. Not that we'd ventured off-track into the deep cover yet.

I remember this -as the forestry access-lane started to dwindle, we saw three men in black-and-white clothes walking quick-step along a parallel track. I can't recall their exact clothing, except they were each different. They walked with their heads lowered and didn't even see us. Maybe yomping soldiers? Anyway, that's viz-a-viz nothing, just a funny little memory.

We were in a section of the wood nearer to Hawkesbury than Sherston or Didmarton. I believe that down the other end, there's a stately home. There'd been a small discussion about what we'd do if we were disturbed by some ruddy-cheeked groundsman who cried trespass. I suppose it would've depended what sort of man he was. Shouting the odds, but otherwise just doing his job? I had a wad of notes I'd have bribed him with. Shouting the odds, and a c-t to boot? A fist in the ribs and three bolting wood-nymphs.

D had only vague memories about where Raggedy Cot the Second might be. He claimed to be triangulating through a certain channel of grandis trees in the shape of a roundabout, plus a tall line of black cedars. His dad had believed that pheasants liked as dark a foliage as possible to nest in. All the time, however, there was a constant tightness of thin little hedera bushes, russet, brown. I think it was about fifty-fifty, the ratio of trunks that were ivy-covered, each one set about four paces apart. Just like Blair Witch Country, except nowhere near as expansive -even at the thickest part, you can walk clear in less than two hours.

Quarter of an hour in. The absence of litter was pretty breathtaking, I suppose because I'm so used to urban woods. There weren't even any shotgun shells, either -usually the hallmark of any large wood in the vicinity of green quilt aristos. Half an hour in, D said something like, "The silence isn't as bad as in the Blair Witch, that's something". It being summer, there was plenty of bird song and insect noise.

Ever the sinister man, I pointed out we might have our own kind of scary to contend with. For instance, if the reservoir still had traces of water in it -the Japanese believe that water, particularly still water, was very connected with the spirits of the dead. Perhaps that was the very purpose of this second, more isolated Raggedy Cot? To give the witches an inlet to the underworld?

"You can tell he's a writer", S said about me.

D's face sometimes creased into a point like Tom Cruise. He told how he wasn't really sure it was a water tower like the first Raggedy Cot. It made no sense for a water tower to be so deep in the wood, so far from any access lanes. More likely it was some kind of medieval hunting hide.

"If it's even there at all", said S.

Said D, "If we find it, and it's a dumped B & Q wardrobe, I'll be pretty f-ing nonplussed".

We live by hype every second of our lives. Stupid internal promises we make to ourselves. Either that or fuzzy distractions. Amazingly, eventually, the hype of Raggedy Cot the Second _did _manifest in our eyes. It wasn't in the least overgrown like Number One -all the same it seemed to merge and hide simply within the summer haze. From as little as ten paces away, it seemed barely the height of a human figure. Only once you were directly alongside did you appreciate that it was two story.

Design-wise, it had four walls, each slightly convex, tapering off to a roof made up four childish-looking turrets. Inside, not a timber of the floorboards and ceilings were broken. There was a partially-spiraled staircase which edged up to the second floor, guarded by a single bat that had been dead for years without decomposing (which I snagged up with a stick and threw outside). Theories about whether it was in fact a reservoir tower or a hunting lodge were inconclusive either way -there was an exposed hole off to one side on the ground floor, though it was packed with mud and grit. Some of the tarred roof boards had been sanded out into a handy, outward-opening hatchway leading to the turrets. It was looped with a sixties-looking padlock -tin, able to be prized apart with less-than-brute force.

D had a fancy camera but for a moment or two hung back, deeply hesitant about the best angle. Meanwhile S scampered around the inside, now and again taking weird, absolutely motionless pauses to stare at the recesses. It was a relatively well-lit interior, owing to the two thin glass wedges a cross between medieval slats and cottage windows. Plus the masonry was a fairly bright grey colour. If you want to get an impression, but don't want to go through the trouble of trudging through the woods to find it, I'd suggest a trip to the Tyndale Tower at North Nibley, which has more or less the same feel, if you were to cross it with a windmill, or maybe a Civil War submarine.

Not that D had any inclination to ditch the tent and sleep within. S was up for it, but your man pointed out that more bats might return later, or an owl, and that would freak everyone out. We put it to a vote and I had to pretend to be Mr Deliberation. Personally, I couldn't see anywhere Mr Owl might be able to squeeze in. But though we were in a heatwave, I said, it wasn't outside the realms of possibility that sometime in the early morning, we might get cold, and would need to set a fire. There might also, I suggested mildly, be claustrophobia. In truth, I could imagine it as the type of place you could suddenly get a fever, and the thickness of the stone walls would roar at you. Interestingly, in my journal for that day, I didn't enter any text at all, but rather drew a picture of the tight grey trees surrounding the Raggedy Cot 2. Not the structure itself, just the trees.

After assembling the tent, we had hours to kill before the excitement of dusk. No one had brought a radio. D had bought his darts and we marker-penned one to twelve around the side of a tree, and rotated around as required. In terms of skill, we were all evenly matched, which is more than you can say for me and most pub games. When S was poised to make a shot, I'd sometimes try to phase her by saying, 'Don't be distracted by the witch. Twenty meters behind you. Peeking out from behind a tree'. But it was always D who glanced. I started to make a case, subconsciously and probably apropos nothing, that he was the one who had most trepidations. We heard a very distant dog, out for a walk, barking his head off -D stared in utter fascination.

The sky started to go weird and the wittering birdsong became subdued, more in synch with the sudden darting movements of trying to seek a good nest. Should we go for a walk before settling down? Should we get stuck in to our two bottles of beer per man? We casually sucked the bottles while sitting in a circle and throwing the rave ball to each other.

D said that, while he was watching The Blair Witch, he'd been less than impressed by the strange noises which had troubled the film makers. He explained that tonight we would _certainly_ hear a sound like a baby crying -foxes. Yeah, we'd hear a sound like beach rocks being clacked together -stags messing with the trunks with their antlers. There was also that old favourite, the blast of the owl's trill, as if it actually enjoyed the sheer _abruptness_ of it.

In the darker side of twilight, I asked S; as a girl, what did she imagine the motive was for a regular female choosing to become a witch? Her answer was pretty wise. Lots of people feel sore about the way life treats them, and in medieval times, there was a default belief in the occult, as if you could just choose it as an option. It was probably as simple as that.

We played our torch beams upwards onto the jagged branches, so deep and fuzzy, like those modern, computerised cat-scans; the blips bringing out the 3D all the more. Low, heatwave air pressure -something magic. Certain patches of the surrounding atmos, torch-illuminated, had a fresh and optimistic feel. There were no regular avenues between the trees. Besides, the air prevented our torch beams from travelling too far, blocking them in a tightly-stretched gauze. What went on behind the gauze, in the browny dark?

Our tent was placed alongside the Raggedy Cot 2, about three or four yards away. Eleven PM, and the temperature had just started to cool. Now our torch beams jerked playfully. We were talking, I imagine, about South Park, or Bill Clinton's shenanigans, or Kosovo. Still no fear, except for some eerie fascination when we heard our frivolous voices in a pitch-silence that would otherwise be crazily reverent. There was talk of one of us staying awake to take 'the first watch' like prairie-dwellers in a cowboy or war film. It came to nothing.

D got weary, S to a lesser degree, myself not at all. We lay on our sides in our sleeping bags and, with the aid of S' make-up mirror, we had a three-way stare-out to discern who'd be the penultimate one to fall asleep -the loser would buy breakfast. D went first, '_I'm just blinking. There's no shame in taking a long blink_'. S went second, with a look on her face that suggested she'd forgotten everything, who she was, where she was, whether there was anything to be frightened of.

And I had a horrible, aching sobriety which suggested I wouldn't sleep the whole night, for whatever reason. For quite a while, I played the shadows of my hand on the canvas side, watched as they all coalesced in a whir. Outside, there was no sound whatsoever.

I have a big problem with Buddhists, even without the obvious hypocrisy of claiming to desire a unity with some disembodied, universal consciousness -and then coyly returning back to their original bodies when the meditation ends. Which is not to say meditation isn't a wonderful and profound thing. You sense the novelty of your own consciousness. The visceral lightning blasts of arch-idiosyncratic awareness. But let's be honest, that's all it ever is -a novelty. Increasingly I wondered, if you had a psychic link, could someone _else_ be as impressed by the novelty of this stripped-down consciousness going on in your mind? Someone or something? God would never do it because it's too parochial and besides, He knows there is no such thing as 'universal consciousness'. 'The Other' would have to be some kind of psychic voyeur.

I silently slipped free from the tent and moved gawkily among the trees. The moonlight was bright. Successful, my attempts to move forward without loudly snapping twigs, all the same with the clumping footsteps giving a vibe that was doom-laden.

I moved wide, about five minutes walk from the others, all along calculating where they were at my back should I need to retreat -a pigeon with its homing instinct being forced to account for supernatural dread. I wasn't dreaming; I told myself several times -that much is certain. Over a wheaty carpet of beige bark-chips, beneath thin rows of naked fir trees all thin and buoyant.

Fear soon moved into the background of my mind. Or at least, it was hard to know what was fear and what was anticipation. I remembered my previous theory that supernatural dread could be nullified by thinking of something hysterically funny. Into my head I placed memories of boyhood Saturday afternoon mischief, things which would usually make me grin and shake -only now, in the deep fuzzy dark, all my memories just felt horribly stale. Just 'stale'. I tried thinking of some happy, up-tempo song -I think probably 'Birdhouse in your Soul', but again it just felt old, cheap, useless.

Unthinking, the way everyone is unthinking, I moved into the not-quite-uniform avenues of acacia trees. Sometimes I was 'flicky'-minded. The way Jack Nicholson is flicky-minded in the initial acts of 'The Shining' -why deny it?

It wasn't a dream, or even a lucid dream. Lucid dreams make you appreciate the processing power of your mind, its ability to conjure nuanced details with no notice whatsoever. The drumblast trees -while the steep branches were complex, there was nothing interesting about them, least of all here in the dark. Moving past the enclosed, non-quite-claustrophobic slants, I was -nonplussed.

And then I came upon the statue. It was a deer, with modest antlers and sculpted little muzzle. Or _was_ it a statue? I knew deer were the sort of animal that can tense and go utterly motionless on the slightest reflex. Sometimes their sheer agility makes them complacent. It _was_ a statue, though, made of bronze, but with an unprecedented level of detail. The surface was overlaid with fur textures that seemed increasingly real the closer I got. Think of a Hollywood prop, with glass eyes, close attention to sinews.

Within five feet, I crabbed my legs and moved at angle. Those glass eyes were electrified. I watched the nose, too. It was the strangest thing. It didn't move yet it seemed utterly alive. In another place, in the daylight, I'd have probably said something to the statue, jokily; I'd have said 'hello', as if to a dog. But I was a different man.

I couldn't shake the intuition that this statue was alive, even though the idea was giddily illogical because of the stillness. It was a statue; it had no mind to worry -and so I hissed through my teeth.

Within five inches of the utterly life-like eyes, I hissed like dynamite. I watched the shoulders -if ever the animal would bolt free, now was the last possible moment. It remained still. As a shroud, the darkness helped keep it motionless on obtuse, rigid legs, and it didn't help my quest to provoke it that there was no reflection of light in the eyes. To start with, I'd been nervous that whoever had placed the statue had done so with the intention of driving me mad. All that vanished. I wanted only to bring it back to life, un-taxidermise it. My heart wasn't even beating too fast; it was a wistful old man remembering romance or adventure.

No more hissing. I pulled air through my gripped mouth, as if to shrill a cat. I sensed that strange, infuriating wall of stillness holding it fast, always.

And so I screeched until my throat hurt. The deer instantly came to life and bolted away in a frenzy-panic. It dodged a few trees but inevitably clipped one with its stomach and fell down, loading you with worry about its fragile legs and neck. But -'fragile'. Everything living is fragile but never quite fragile _enough_. It got up and bounded on. Sixty yards away, I could sense it complacently slowing-up in the grainy darkness. Everything was just alive and electrified; no doubt I'd screeched loud enough to wake every living thing within a mile.

Back at the tent, my heart quaked guiltily when I saw the torch beams held steady against the canvas. But as I edged in through the flap, D and S were laughing.

"First p-break cleared with no witch?", asked D.

I asked, mildly, what it was that had woken them. S told that she'd come awake as soon as she'd heard the tent flap go down after I'd exited. And, I asked, still mildly, what they'd heard after that. "We heard nothing", breezed D, in his impression that was either James Mason or John Hurt, "except, of course, the farts".

We laughed and joked for a while longer, but I feigned drowsiness and rolled over on my side. As far as I know, sleep didn't take me at all that night. Interestingly, I wasn't even trying to convince myself what had happened, just expel the sensation of grubby over-thinking. Come the Sunday morning, my friends were despondent that they'd seen nothing supernatural. I remember, in particular, the sight of S, her ruc-sac loaded down once more, staring glumly at the spot we'd just vacated. There'd been sudden, subtle movements in the trees -yes, _overtures_ of the supernatural. But nothing that would stick in the mind. I suppose I only remember the ambience so clearly now because I hyped it all down in my journal.

Life was changing in a rush. Back at the factory on Monday morning, there was mass caterwauling because the management had decided the front line was over-staffed and was set to split us in two, forming two distinct shifts -five to one then one to nine. You know sometimes you get fascinated by the tracks of your life, the way all the obstacles build up and overlap? That Monday was a funny time, all sweeping-up and stock-taking in preparation for the new shift patterns. Where necessary, we trained buddies to be our duplicates on the alternate shifts. Myself, however, I was due to take E's job as the silk-label chief, and no training was necessary because I already knew the ropes. I helped thread some of the giant elastic spindles on the main production line, then just swept up, dusted, polished off the red magic eyes with isopropyl. I think E was in a similar position. At one point we drew parallel with the sweeps of our brushes. I sheepishly told her that, over the weekend, my friends and I had formed a kind of ad-hoc paranormal group. But we'd had no experiences whatsoever. E seemed dismissive. I could only assume she was grumpy about the new shifts, or maybe depressed that she and I were being split up. Older people, I reasoned, are perfectly entitled to rage at change if they want. I should have known she had a better reason.

At lunch time, she joined me on the narrow-hill pic-nic table. Usually we gave each other clearance at breaks, but I was glad to see her. She asked where my friends and I had gone, and I told her about the Raggedy Cot 2, and the wood. Places that were just -_so_ atmospheric, _so_ frightening. It seemed reasonable to assume that if _they_ weren't the domain of ghosts, ghosts didn't exist. At the same time, I admitted -I _had_ sensed them, on a level I couldn't even begin to describe. My running theory on why the ghosts hadn't approached us was that we'd _all_ been scared -but not at the same time.

E was nodding. So -the place was profoundly frightening, yet I hadn't been scared _all_ the time we were there? I thought hard about what she was asking me, and admitted that yes, I'd been scared _all_ the time we were there, but not in such a way that I couldn't hide it from the others.

Sitting there on the pic-nic table, in the motionless sunlight, E produced the most amazing monologue. She told me that there were two types of fear associated with being around ghosts. The first was just the standard fear of being around dead things. It's the type of fear that can quite easily be conjured by watching a horror film, or being somewhere dark, lonely, gothic. Some people believe this fear must be something a-priori in the human brain, but they're wrong. It's actually just a dumb, blunt, segregated fear based on a _deeper_ horror which few people ever identify on a conscious level.

Yes, we all know when ghosts are present. We sense their minds. And through those minds, we come to realise what they are. In life, everything you're most afraid of will come to pass. You will fail. You will suffer. You will be systematically driven insane by sorrow and then you'll die alone. If you think this is apocryphal and you'll somehow escape these things -no, then you died a long time ago. You believed your mind was nothing more than a sponge for idiosyncratic determination, at every second with wise, anti-heroic calculations to see you clear. But it's mutually exclusive to the world. You don't belong among the living, with all their shameless determination and their animal solidarity.

In this state, after you've finally died, what becomes of psychology? Your mind, alienated as it is, is disintegrating. What's left? There's no point trying to connect with the living in any meaningful way, even if your mind still has the processing power. We're reduced to the level of unsympathetic children, teasing, provoking.

Had I, asked E, read 'Shadow Matter' by Gerhard Wasserman? It disconcerted me that she imagined I'd read such an obscure book. It's a fallacy that any reasonably-researched paranormal book written before, say, 1990, is considered 'a classic', but actually, 'Shadow Matter' is a fairly tenuous investigation. Though it contains some complex formulas to explain the various types of ghost, the formulas are based on nothing more than cod-scientific algebra. What marks 'Shadow Matter' out is the case studies, all chosen to support Wasserman's idea that, even as ghosts, people have a finite existence, that their every piece of behavior revolves around loneliness and dissolution. Playful and attention-hungry -and then a fade to nothingness.

Something horrible was taking place with E, I sensed that much. A counter-argument formed; what about that certain story involving John and Julian Lennon? Lennon had always told his son that, if there was any kind of afterlife, he'd one day return and make a white feather float in mid air before his eyes. Then, years after his dad had died, he was getting ready to go on stage, deathly nervous, when a postman unexpectedly delivered a package to the stadium reception. It was a Red Indian headdress which had been stolen from the Beatles decades ago. It had only just been re-discovered. On opening the box, the feathers went everywhere. Some of them seemed to float.

I wondered how anyone could nay-say such an optimistic story. But E nodded sadly. 'The exception that proves the rule'. She pointed out how John Lennon was one of the most hopeful men who'd ever lived, hopeful-as-default. You can be hopeful and wretched at once. And besides, where was his ghost when George Harrison was almost murdered in his own home, or when McCartney was crazy with grief over Linda? This idea of an elegant threshold between life and afterlife, and everyone is just the same, living or dead -a nonsense. The suggestion that there are certain levels of reality the living mind isn't privy to, profound and all-encompassing, but not to the degree where we can't meet in the middle like listless bourgeois women. For someone who's been chewed-up-and-spit-out by the world, it's just another arbitrary social club. E spoke of the sixties, when her mother and aunts were obsessed with travelling to the most distant towns to make the most of their weekends. Ever the isolated child, and not one for shopping, E had always made a bee-line for the library, and then, with directions in hand, she'd gone to the street containing the town's Spiritualist church. Making a conscious effort not to look at the street numbers, she tried to guess the domain of the Spiritualists simply by the architecture, 'the feel'. A subconscious decision seemed to rule the land: their slab-like castles had to have none of the flourishes associated with regular churches, but had to be stark and weird in recompense. Where no Spiritualist church was available, she loitered outside the austere house of whatever local spinster offered séances. Street cats distractedly rubbing around her legs as she looked for spirits. Groups of friends walking past, led by the bubbling laughter emitted through their mouths, absorbed between buildings, absorbed in time.

This was the last time I saw E, and for a while I wondered why. I'd assumed we'd at least see each other as the two shifts changed, and it was a long time since I figured out that she'd left the company altogether.

Meanwhile, I became -I suppose, 'unconscious'. I didn't worry about whether I slept well or not, I didn't worry about whether my mind was too blurry for work, which should have been liberating, but wasn't. I floated. At the weekends, I took country walks which, in retrospect, seem bizarrely and inexplicably long. I scaled every ridge and rise in the South West. At the ruddy, canal-sweat basins of All Cannings, in the strangely-insurmountable recesses of the Marlborough and Wantage ridgeways -I felt them, the Neolithic everymen, the Celts, and Saxons. Through their belief in dark, uncompromising religions, they all of them clung to the steep valleysides.

I was still a young man, though -one Saturday, at the central pic-nic car park of the Wessex Downs, I was hunched at one of the tables when I found myself joined by a pretty European twenty year-old. Her friends were in patio chairs beside a nearby camper. The sunset was bright and elegant, but nothing spectacular. She started talking to me, quite casually, in French. Initially, there was quite some fascination that she thought I'd understand a single word she was saying. There was never even a 'Oui' or 'Non' to latch onto. Oddly, there wasn't even the usual scattering of words that are same in both French and English; it was as though we were both deeply nuanced representatives of dead civilisations -_impossibly_ nuanced. I gestured at the sunset and wondered aloud, something like, "Perhaps you're talking about the great broad sky, and the solid-intangible ozone, velvety, not particularly delicate, vibrant, like your pretty European skin". It was a kind of game, like Mallett's Mallet but with flowing soliloquies: we spoke to each other unfalteringly, she in French, me in English.

Perhaps inevitably, it turned dark. It was a subdued August evening, and soon I'd have to hike back down through the witch-haunted burrow-path to the Ramsbury B & B -or if that was full, taxi it to Swindon. I was a little embarrassed by this lack of bohemian grit. I hurriedly considered 'talking' with her until dark and then just sleeping in a bus shelter or in a wood. But I decided not to because I was afraid of the cold. I was embarrassed by this lack of freedom. But more than that, there was now a verbal-hypnotic obsession playing in my head. You could be telling me daydreams, or predicting the future, spilling out your soul. Equally, you could be telling me about a bereavement, only putting on a brave face like the most wondrously pragmatic, revolutionary girl the world has ever known. But me? I could gradually be giving you the formula that proves God is dead. And you'd know straight away by the sudden hitch in my voice, like an animal, the sudden guilty flare in my eye. And then an oblivion of madness.

At some point I got up and backtracked from the heavy pic-nic table, feeling like a ghost whenever I broke eye contact. She periodically spoke to me again from the distance, before shouldering her way back to the camper. Always long sentences, no 'Au revoir', just the treatise from an Ingmar Bergman film, comedy or tragedy. And I was alone in the scratchy little trees of the burrow-path.

On subsequent weekend treks, I'd often take a little handheld radio and would listen to a French station. In those days, there was still quite a few operating on MW. I walked the ridges with their hunched-up coppices, always greatly brooding on the Westbury plains. They put such emphasis on making stark landmarks; causeways able to be seen twenty miles in either direction, white horses, Neolithic barrows, hill forts. But between them all, these narrow little coppices of beech trees, tangles of shadowy woodchip at your feet. Little seclusions that had no special meaning. Except a meaning from the collective unconscious, about ghosts.

There I lingered, never feeling more like a poised and statuesque monster. So at one with the smooth bark I could feel those country postcard antlers growing clear from my skull, mingling with the tall branches. Also, the French radio stations were a strange affair. Possibly analogous with Radio 4, but quieter, more intellectual. What's the single worse crime that any radio station can commit? The continuity announcer and the news readers would all-too-often take gulpy pauses, and absolute silence would reign. It was a radio station from the end of the world.

I haunted those woods, but always retreated back to my house at night. Which was silly. Silly to be afraid of sleeping outside in the cold. Cold is the default state of the universe -if there were no suns, no crass exposition from the big bang. Cold and silent, and if you're afraid of hearing ghosts, it's only because you're afraid of hearing your own thumping brain.

Winter was coming, and didn't it come. I awoke one morning in my freezing flat to discover a strange letter. The top sheet was a piece of solicitor's legalese which I read several times but barely understood. The second sheet was a covering letter from the solicitor himself. The third leaf was a sad, informal note from a man I'd never met before.

E had committed suicide. One weekend, she and her brother were preparing to drive to one of the big supermarkets in Bristol. While adjusting the headrest of her seat, she'd broken her hand. It was while she was at the A & E that a consultant noticed some anomaly, which in turn led to the discovery that her whole body was advanced-along with blastic lesions. Nothing could be done. They offered retroactive drugs and pain management, but E was curiously breezey. On only the second night of dealing with the news, she'd promptly snuck out of the house with a personal cassette player and three bottles of whisky. It was a week of fierce overnight frosts. In the line of trees at the edge of Bath Racecourse, Bevil Greville's Gryphon glaring down, she'd been content to sit against a tree and slip serenely into oblivion while staring at the city lights. The paramedics said that it would indeed have been a wholly painless way to die.

Myself, I was edged in deeper because of the fact E had left me quite a few paranormal books in her will, plus a goodbye letter, all of which, infuriatingly, I had to fill out a solicitor's chitty for. At least E's brother was a pleasant enough man to deal with. She'd always said that his divorce had brought out all his best qualities and set them in stone. Fears of bereavement-awkwardness and a weak little shake of the hand faded into nothing when I met a big-bear-of-a-man who couldn't help but emit John Wayne reassurance. He passed to me a butter box full of paperbacks, whereas the goodbye letter from E he gave to me separately, placing it in my fingers in a gesture that was gentle, sober, almost passé.

After leaving his house, I regretted not asking him what tape or tapes she'd taken with her to Bath, regretted not having the nerve to ask him, even if I'd thought of it. It was one of the things that would play on my mind. Sitting on a park bench, in Hell, numbly holding the envelope, there were further considerations -a flurry of possibilities, the biggest of which -what if, in the letter, she made a Lennon-esque promise to return to me in spirit form, bringing reassurances of the validity of the afterlife? It was a terrible thought. I didn't want to be beholden to a ghost. Ghosts, if they come to you merely on a promise -insipid. Can you imagine anything worse?

It's like coincidences. Over the years, I've enjoyed some truly staggering coincidences, to such a degree that I can see a hint of some weird template for the whole of reality reaching out from my squirming little mind. But if they ever became _more _than a hint? If the coincidences started to ask for me by name?

Opening the envelope was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do, and there was quite a bit of guilt that, in the end, all that was written was a pragmatic goodbye, a promise that she knew what she was doing. And afterlife or no afterlife, she had no regrets and no expectations beyond those which she could handle.

That night, I fingered through the box of books, fifty-fifty paperbacks and sans-dust-jacket hardbacks. Started to read 'The Holographic Universe' by Michael Talbot, having marked it out as a book of life-changing potential. Mr Itchy-Sleep-Mind, there was far less reading than normal; I felt, just as always, that I wanted to drift off and wake in the morning at the sound of the alarm clock. Instead, I dozed for ten or twenty minutes then woke at once, unable to sleep again for the rest of the night.

Perhaps traditional psychiatry would think of it as a nervous breakdown. It's just, I wasn't nervous, at least not hysterically. Similarly, I've always guarded myself against even a whisper of schizophrenic illogic. This was something new. I endlessly thought of E, alone and dying in the woods. It felt like un-reality.

Over the years, at work, I sometimes made big, company-threatening mistakes, and the worry always tried to keep me awake at night. Nevertheless, I was able to slip outside of myself into an abstract void of lateral-thinking. Not that night. I can't even describe the exact nature of the worry. Certainly, for one, there was a fear that E's cassette player had failed and she'd died feeling alone. Or that she'd been unable to get properly drunk, and had died feeling alone.

There was a more elusive element, though. Hard to describe. I try to describe it now only for the sake of completeness. It felt like I'd made a gentle little mistake a very long time ago, and since then it had stayed gentle. But now it was drowning me. And the water in which I drowned was heroin-addict wise. It felt like that time when you're a teenager, and you first start to suspect God and society hates you. You can't make utilitarian plans to survive the scurrying machinations of fate, its henchmen, people, and so for sanity's sake, you put it out of your mind as best you can. But all along there was something running parallel to that phenomenon. A Mxyzptlk consciousness waiting in the woods to both affirm you -and laughingly dissolve you to the low air pressure.

The next day, I took my first sick-day since forever. Rest assured, if I was thinking straight, even if I'd had a broken leg or bird flu, I'd still have fallen in. No breakfast either, even a force-fed breakfast, despite the fact that a clenched and empty belly was clearly part of the problem. A return to bed would have been sensible. Instead I was drawn outdoors. There was a swarm of insects in my head, leading me left, leading me right, never leading me to peace.

In this way, a whole day was passed. I remember going in shops -only if ever there'd been a person going in a shop with less inclination to buy something, I can't imagine them. Towards the afternoon, I was so exhausted, for a while, even E's death became a background consideration. At midafternoon, I returned to my flat and my mind eased -but only because a stark resolution had been reached. I'd have to go to that certain swathe of elm trees on the Lansdown valley, where I pictured E leaning down to die. I felt it was the approximate location, and even if it wasn't, all I had to do was show solidary among the freezing white trees, let her spirit know that it wasn't alone. It seemed a straight-forward philosophy.

Bussing the ten miles to Bath seemed to take an eerily short time. For some reason, I was loathe to take a taxi to the crest of the valley, and in fact I made him stop at one of the housing estates that edge out into the lonely fields. I walked the remainder. See the bungalows, the two-story houses that are so modest they _look _like bungalows. Through generations, the families doting on Bath City FC, Saracens, the dozens of tennis clubs, just because, subconsciously, the surrounding fields are so clean and groomed in the style of sports pitches. I could live like that.

Instead, the woods were my lot. It had been twilight for some time -in a city like Bath, it never gets truly dark, anyway. The scintillating lights could always be felt even on a turned back, daydreams of a scrunch-nosed classy girlfriend looking around nook arcade shops, a complete lie. This man had only guilty-mesmerised eyes fixed on a grey ridge of winter trees.

I wondered if the threshold of E's dell would still have the police tape across it. I found it didn't, and this made me feel more than a little sad that the occasion had faded so soon. I envisioned her primed and nimble mouth, her gold-colour skin and youthful eyes -and felt as if I was the only person in the world who remembered her. Or no, worse even than that. I came to understand the horrific truth. For all her worry about exposure to ghosts, of dwindling out in a lonely and unsympathetic afterlife -E didn't need to fret. She had a twinkle in her eye and an agile soul which would protect her, always. But me? Let's be honest, I thought. You belong in the husky darkness, in the self-secluding clusters of alders and limes. There's not a minute of your life that goes by without an ambient acceptance of oblivion-as-liberation.

The winter bluster didn't intensify or fade at the top, though it was more noticeable between the black-brown trunks, the unrelenting cold. It feels weird to be writing about it -at the time, I made no journal entry for that day; the first time for years I'd left a day with no record at all. Either way, no one would believe it.

Things got wild as the intense freeze set in. The sparse section of trees I ended up in were only about five hundred yards from the main road, except any traffic sound was completely swallowed by punchy bursts of wind. The very thickest stretch was only ten-to-fifteen trunks deep. Beyond, about 200 meters across the fields: the stark roadside pub which served the race course and all the fussy little farms lined up along the crest of Bath. Fluttery ideas came into my mind about being just -breathlessly scared- by a ghost or witch, then running across and being saved in the midst of last orders, reassured by some Dulcima John Mills figure. But a wiser part of me knew -this was surely the time when I'd get totally transfixed. On the face of it, I remember being almost pragmatic.

I was hearing the laconic French radio stations in my mind; I realised I'd been hearing them for hours, if not days. I'm not denying that if you'd been able to listen in to my mind, you'd simply have heard nonsense-French, but to me it sounded absolutely real, and more importantly -nanosecond spontaneous. Yet, despite being part of my mind, the French speakers were still not completely on my side. The voices stopped dead. As I saw something black and craggy move steadily from right-to-left between the trunks -in mid-air- giving me a sharp pain in my abdomen from sheer terror.

Easily I was as petrified as anyone has ever been. The muscles around my heart felt horrible. Except, not at all like your girl from the Blair Witch Project. I remember, at one point during the end sequence, she apologises for causing them to be 'hunted'. I wasn't being hunted. This was like the discovery of something as natural as _breathing_, as natural as _thinking_ -yet elaborate like the big bang, and full of more hysteria than can be generated by the human mind during any number of earthly lifetimes. It felt like non-human screaming and non-human laughter both at once. I can't describe it. And I can't to this day figure out how I didn't have a heart attack.

On one side there was the glittering lights of the city. Ten or twenty feet out on the other side, I heard children laughing and talking in a successive foreign language (not French, perhaps Latin?). I picked out dim, misty-black shapes like a row of knuckles moving in a fist. Sometimes, the children would stop laughing as if it had suddenly occurred to them that they were involved in a solemn ceremony, and they'd make what sounded like a husky prayer. This coincided with my glancing down and seeing an amorphous white shape, very broadly humanoid and at a two-third scale. Ask me if it was solid or vapourous and I can't tell you -except that it had the same quality as cat's eyes, in terms of being able to catch and retain any amount of light without causing glare. Even if there was a nearby light source on the field side, it wouldn't have explained the alternate shading of fuzzy grey to brilliant satin. It went about its business in a delirium, prominent 'shoulders' heaving and shaking.

If you think about it for more than a cursory amount of time, ghosts are very explicable. What do we measure our lives against? Death. Yet how often does that measurement actually come into play? There's a physical-psychological neutral zone between life and death. You could deny it by saying that we all go inside that space through serious illnesses, narrow escape car crashes, bereavement -yet these opportunities to enter the neutral zone are always diverted by the warm railtracks of our minds, promising further days in the big wide world, further conversations with pretty girls, country lane walks, movies, cycles of sleep and waking, religion. So no, we don't exist within even one percent of the world of ghosts. From this perspective, they're drawn to us as tantalising play-things. This is the truth of it. Death and entropy; things that are so simple, yet bringing forth a relationship which is just -blunt, horrific. We're both simple-minded. It's just that the ghosts, they know it.

At twenty feet away, the humanoid properly squared up and started to stalk towards me. The sense of confidence was insanely powerful - something to twist in your gut. Between me and it, a dozen woodland twigs snapped sharply. The sense of confidence, combined with hysterical danger, caused me to bolt free from the wood. At the layby, and ironically, since I'd just cleared a dozen potential trips -I fell forward and winded myself. Which of the two hills to run back down into Bath? There wasn't a lot in it, except one hill had a slightly higher quotient of shops, bus stops, cosmopolitan-shadowy houses.

I say again, as I said it then in my journal: we imagine an abstract map of our souls, or a symbol, or a diagram, bold and beautiful. But never as bold and beautiful as the stark silhouette of those dense woods. Bark, lichen, moss, cracked and colourful in a vision of economy we can barely conceive of. And then the branches, angling upwards. Steep as you like but without ever pointing to heaven. Over the years, ideas of asking a local vicar to go up there and sprinkle holy water. My rehearsed explanation to him is something that's laid-down in my mind like a train track, deceptively easy to convey. Except, what would be the point? You can't deny these things the freedom they have. The musty air between the branches.

At the last bit of steepness before the levelling-out of central Bath, I went to a brightly lit all-night garage. The sight of the woman behind the intercom screen made quite an impression on me. I decided to buy something expensive which would justify having a conversation with her, justify the high-concept solace after what had happened in the woods. I bought three Panama Panatellas and a portable radio. She smiled at me, and I tried not to stare at her beautiful hair and swollen eyes. Lower eyelids swollen but perfectly flesh-coloured. Triangle-shaped lips, smiling. I quickly put the money down and tried not to confuse her, making no sudden moves, giving no eye-contact, before drifting back out into the countryside.

We draw you in, we provoke and scare you. And after that there's just a tangle of broken sensations hanging between the trees.


End file.
